Dream of Darkness, page 5
‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.
His voice was unaccented, unaccentuated, totally lacking in threat. But she remembered what the pangas had done to her mother, and the sea might as well have been concrete for all the power of movement her legs had.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘You think because I’m black I must be lusting after your lily-white body? Be easy. From here, it looks more pink turning to grey. Also, I try to avoid ravishing before midday on the Sabbath. I only want to talk.’
‘You can talk here,’ she said, with only a slight tremor. The dogs had left the water and were gambolling happily round the legs of the man, in the hope of enticing him to play. It would be nice to think they were good judges of character, but she wouldn’t bet her life on it.
‘All right,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Though it’s a little public.’
He stooped to pick up a piece of driftwood which he hurled into the water with Polly and Mop in close pursuit. Public? thought Sairey, looking up the empty beach. If this was public, what was his definition of private?
Then she glimpsed something in the dunes, a flash of light like sun glancing off a windscreen. At the same time, as though at a signal, water pulled at her legs. The tide had turned. Next moment, a vehicle came surging over the crest of a dune. It was some kind of jeep, with four-wheel drive, that ripped through the fine loose sand with hardly any problems of traction. For a second she thought that it had come in response to the black man’s summons and she lay back in the water, preparatory to riding the tide out to sea if it came after her into the shallows.
But the man on the beach had turned in alarm as he heard the vehicle’s approach and suddenly he was off, running parallel to the water’s edge. He still carried Sairey’s towel, streaming behind him like a banner, and Mop and Polly cavorted at his heels, delighted at this new game. He ran with a deceptively fast, high, loping stride, but the jeep was speeding after him on an interceptory diagonal, and collision seemed inevitable.
‘Into the water!’ screamed Sairey. ‘Into the water!’
It was his only hope of escape, though why she should be concerned for a man whom a few seconds earlier she had found terrifying, she couldn’t say.
He was splashing through the shallows now, but the jeep was almost upon him. It had two occupants, a big hard-faced man driving and, by his side, a slighter man holding what looked like a pistol. Not that he needed it. A few seconds more and they would run their quarry down. But just as impact seemed inevitable, the black man halted and leapt gracefully aside. Then, like a toreador making a pass with his cape, he laid Sairey’s beach towel across the windscreen as the vehicle sped by within inches.
The driver’s blindness was only momentary, but it was enough. The jeep ploughed into the water over the axles and came to a halt. The black man turned and loped up towards the dunes, with the excited dogs still in pursuit. In the water the engine roared, and the vehicle juddered, and for a while it looked as if it might have got firmly stuck in the soft sand. But slowly it came out backwards, then crashed into forward gear, and the chase was on again. By now, however, the black man was clambering up the dunes and as Sairey watched, he dropped out of sight. The jeep needed to take a more serpentine route but a few moments later it, too, vanished over the crest.
Now Sairey came out of the water and ran up the beach, desperate to catch the outcome of this drama. But when she had clambered up the highest dune and stood among the spikey sea grass, she found she was too late. There was the sound of a distant engine, or perhaps engines. A movement caught her eye, then the sound of excited barking, and Polly and Mop came back. It was easy to see they had a tale to tell, but whether of capture or evasion was impossible to make out.
She went back to the water’s edge to collect her towel, which was floating in the shallows. This, and the jeep’s tracks across the sand, were the only proof she had of what had taken place.
But what had taken place? A black man on a beach, some more men in a jeep, a chase, a disappearance, and nothing left to show but some tyre tracks in the sand.
She ran back to the house with the excited dogs at her heels. But as the gate came into view her pace slowed, and after a few steps she halted.
The gate was open. She was sure that she had at least pulled it to, and almost certain that she’d locked it. The dogs were looking up at her, hopefully scenting a new adventure. Then a figure stepped out from the shadow of the porch and the dogs bayed excitedly, sensing the tension of her muscles, the imminence of action.
‘Sairey! There you are. I was beginning to think I’d dropped in on the Marie Celeste!
She relaxed, walked forward. The dogs, disappointed, attacked each other in compensation.
‘Hello, Grandad,’ she said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
Sir Joseph Lightoller was a small, slim man. As a child, Sairey had been fascinated by the lines of black hair which fanned out from his wrists and ran along the backs of his fingers. This, and the monocle he sometimes affected, had seemed the most distinctive things about him. But with age, she had observed the way he held himself very straight and erect, as if to make the most of his few inches, and also a slight staginess in the way he projected both himself and his voice socially.
She took him into the house and made coffee. He told her that he was motoring down to Brighton and had diverted on a whim, to look her up.
Some whim. Some diversion, she thought.
She said, ‘You must have set off early.’
‘Only way to avoid the coast traffic on a Sunday,’ he said.
‘But how did you know I was here?’
‘The small estrangement between your father and myself does not mean that I cannot ask, nor he reply, to civil questions. Are you not glad to see me?’
‘Of course I am,’ she replied, but when she consulted her inner litmus she found its colour ambiguous.
Perhaps she had never seen enough of him to get very close to him. And she could still recall Aunt Celia’s reaction to the days she spent with him. Gifts were dismissed with a cold, ‘very nice,’ and questions about her activities seemed less concerned with her enjoyment than with the things her grandfather had said.
On her move to London to join her father and his new wife, it had seemed likely she would see rather more of Sir Joe. Then something had happened at work which provoked her father to storm around the house promising all kinds of unpleasant things to his father-in-law. And to someone called Archbell, she now recalled. The man in the wedding photo. The man in the car, that night in the Square.
She’d understood none of this; she was a child then, knew herself to be very much still a child even now, and was concerned only with effects, not causes. But a time was fast approaching when she would have to face up to the cause of things.
‘Aren’t you going to change? You’ll catch your death,’ he said.
She was still wearing her bathing suit. The run up the beach and the warmth of the house had dried her off to some extent, but she was beginning to feel a little chilly.
She hesitated and said, ‘How long can you stay?’
Sir Joe laughed and said, ‘You’re more of a diplomat than your father. What you mean is, do I want Celia to find me here when she returns from her devotions, which is what I presume she is at? No, I suppose I don’t. I have once before been accused by Celia of trying to win you away by stealth to a better life, and I don’t care to repeat the experience.’
‘You mean, you no longer want a better life for me?’ joked Sairey.
‘No. 1 mean that your choices are now your own. Or ought to be. Are you looking forward to Cambridge?’
‘I suppose so. I mean, I am, but we’ve put it off for a year.’
He frowned and said, ‘You’ve not been well, I gather.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I had to be away on business for a while, and the first thing I always do on my return from a trip is check up on those nearest and dearest, which, in my case, is you.’
‘Oh. Well, yes, I wasn’t too good. I couldn’t sleep. But I’m fine now. Truly. Grandad, why have you and Daddy fallen out?’
She only asked the question to change the subject, but then she realized she wanted to know.
‘We haven’t really. Your father has fallen out with his old employer, that’s all, and I’m the nearest thing to a senior executive for him to vent his wrath on. It will pass. Listen, Sairey, I must go soon. It’s always been a matter of regret that I’ve never been able to do as much for you as I wished. Now you’re eighteen, I can at least make my offers direct. Except, I find myself uncertain what to offer! You’re all that remains to me of your mother, just as she was all that remained to me of my wife. I should like you to be able to love me, but we can’t dictate these things. Nor, I am very much aware, can we buy them. So there is no motive other than my love and care for you when I say that, if you would like to spend a bit of time travelling before you settle to the books, even unto a trip around the world, then regard me as your Cook, Thomas or Captain, whichever you prefer. Open offer. No time limit. No hooks. Only, I should prefer your acceptance outside the hours of one to five A.M. I need less and less sleep as I get older, but what I do need, I need badly.’
The joke was meant to dilute the emotional intensity of his words, but it was too late. Sairey’s eyes had already filled with tears. She came and knelt beside him and pressed her face into his tweed jacket.
She said, ‘I do love you, Grandad, only …’
‘Yes?’ he prompted.
‘I don’t really know you,’ she said hesitantly.
‘You mean, not like you know your father, say?’
She raised her head to look into his face, and surprised a savage smile. It faded as she watched, and he said, ‘Loyalties, loves, we have so little to say in choosing them that it seems most unfair when circumstances force us to rank them. Now, I must go before your guardian dragon returns.’
‘She’s nothing like a dragon,’ protested Sairey. ‘You’re not afraid of her?’
‘Afraid of having a sweet interlude soured, that’s all,’ he said, shifting her gently and rising. ‘Will you tell her I’ve been?’
‘Do you not want me to?’ asked Sairey.
‘I don’t mind. I was just interested. Everything you do, Sairey, must be of interest to me. No, don’t come out. The sooner you get under a hot shower, the better.’
At the door he paused, looking out across the dunes.
‘I thought I saw a jeep or a sand buggy roaring around here when I arrived. Do you have much bother from that sort of thing?’
She said, ‘Hardly at all, really.’
‘Good. I should hate to think that Celia’s little plot was finally being invaded, though it would need an armoured division to take the house! Bye now, darling.’
He kissed her quickly on the cheek and walked away, his back straight as a soldier’s. Sairey watched him out of sight then went in and showered. She was quite unconscious of any debate in her mind, but when Celia returned from church and said, ‘Just got up, have we?’ all she replied was, ‘Not really. Me and the beasts have been for a swim, but apart from that I must admit we’ve been pretty lazy!’
That night, the Dream returned, with all its associated, less coherent nightmares. She concealed it from her aunt for three days, but then her tired appearance and her mental withdrawal made concealment impossible. But at least the delay had won her goal.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t ring Daddy. Vita will be back now. She was due home this week. Ring Vita, please.’
‘Vita may be tired after her flight and busy after her absence,’ said Celia dismissively. ‘She’ll probably have neither the time nor the energy to cope with you.’
But she rang, all the same.
The phone was answered on the second ring. Vita Gray listened to Celia’s explanation without speaking, but when the older woman started to list the many reasons why it was unlikely Vita would be able to help, she interrupted brusquely.
‘I’ll come down this evening. I’ll stay overnight, then take Sairey back to town with me tomorrow. Don’t make a meal for me.’
‘I’m quite capable of dropping a handful of nuts into a bowlful of lettuce,’ said Celia, with heavy irony. But the phone had gone dead.
‘Hello, hello,’ said Celia, jiggling the receiver. Suddenly the line came back to life and she heard a voice that wasn’t Vita’s, but was, nevertheless, very familiar.
‘… handful of nuts into a bowlful of lettuce.’
And then the line went dead again.
6
‘Hitherto, the occasion of these attacks has been clear …’
‘Attacks?’ interrupted Celia. ‘Isn’t that putting it a bit strong?’
‘Dreams are the attacks the subconscious makes on the psyche,’ said Vita Gray. ‘Believe me, it’s a perfectly apt metaphor.’
‘But it’s not an illness in the strict sense, is it? Can’t she be treated, then, by, I don’t know, by …’
‘By love and fresh air?’ said Vita. ‘You’ve offered her plenty of those, yet still the attacks recur.’
‘That word again. It makes it all sound so dangerous!’
‘Believe me,’ said Vita fiercely, ‘it is dangerous. These attacks are like someone beating at your door with growing ferocity. Either you open that door or it will eventually be smashed down.’
The two women were sitting on either side of a glowing fire, made necessary by a stiff easterly blowing along the Channel. Sairey had reluctantly gone to bed half an hour earlier, and Celia would have swiftly followed if Vita hadn’t indicated an untypical readiness to talk.
‘You say the course of these … attacks … has been clear, hitherto. How?’ asked Celia.
Vita never wasted words on things like, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ but she let her eyes say it for her, even as her voice patiently rehearsed the past.
‘Sairey was three when she and Sarah went to join Nigel in Kenya. Her world was her mother. A child’s world usually is, at that age, but even more so in Sairey’s case as she had seen very little of her father in those first three years.’
‘He was a busy man. His work took him abroad. Important government work. He couldn’t refuse to go,’ said Celia defensively.
‘I’m explaining Sairey, not accusing Nigel,’ said Vita. ‘Her physical environment changed dramatically, from that gloomy house in Masham Square to East African heat and brightness. But her mother was there, so the change was readily accepted. More difficult to assimilate, perhaps, were the new relationships …’
‘Her relationships? Nigel, you mean? He’s her father!’
‘She’d seen little of him in her short life. And, from what I gather, she continued to see little. All right, I know, he was a busy man. Would you call him an open, outgoing man?’
‘Of course. He has always been incredibly popular, at school, in the army, in his job. What are you trying to say?’
‘Not say, discover,’ said Vita, frowning in concentration. ‘I know how much you love him. You practically brought him up, didn’t you? All I’m saying is that Nigel was possibly still a rather ambiguous figure in Sairey’s mind when … it happened.’
Such a turning away from plain statement was so untypical as to catch Celia’s attention.
‘She was very dear to you, wasn’t she, Vita?’ she said gently.
‘To us all, I hope,’ said Vita curtly. ‘Nigel must have been distraught when Sarah vanished. It was fortunate you happened to turn up at that time.’
‘I didn’t happen to turn up. It was planned. I was invited,’ said Celia. ‘I had to go to Nairobi to settle some legal business which had come up in regard to my father’s estate, a matter of some property which he’d let on a lease which was now up.’
‘Couldn’t Nigel have dealt with it?’
‘I was my father’s executor,’ said Celia. ‘Nigel was still a minor when the will was made. Our father saw no reason to change things later.’
‘No. So you had arranged to fly on to Kampala after your business in Nairobi was done?’
‘You sound more like a detective than a psychiatrist, Vita,’ said Celia tartly. ‘Or are the two things the same? The answer is no. First, I’d planned to go up to Nyeri for a couple of days to take a look at the old farm, see Mother’s grave, that sort of thing. But at the last moment I changed my mind.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘With or without permission, you seem to be asking,’ retorted Celia. ‘The simple truth is, I lost my nerve. This was my first time back in Kenya since we’d got out in the fifties. Some memories are best left unstirred, that’s what I felt.’
‘And still feel?’
‘Perhaps. So instead of heading north to Nyeri, I got a seat on the next flight for Entebbe. I sent Nigel a cable, of course, but I’d gathered that Uganda wasn’t at its most efficient just then, so I wasn’t much surprised when there was no one to meet me at the airport. I made my way into town and to the house. There I found Sairey in the care of some ancient servant, Nigel was out on business and Sarah, well, Sarah had, in fact, set out to pick me up. I thought she’d probably had a puncture or something. It wasn’t till much later that I began to get worried …’
The two women sat in silence for a while after that, each face composed to conceal whatever thoughts and emotions surged within.
‘Did you see Sarah after she was killed?’ asked Vita suddenly.
‘No!’
‘Did Nigel tell you about her injuries?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. He might have done. What …’
‘Was she raped?’
‘For God’s sake, woman!’ exclaimed Celia, in horror. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Nothing. I simply wondered whether the autopsy report said she’d been sexually molested by her attackers,’ said Vita equably.
‘If any such vileness was discovered, no one mentioned it to me,’ said Celia, her voice trembling with barely restrained emotion. ‘Now, I think this has gone far enough. I can see no reason for stirring up these painful memories and I can’t begin to understand your motives in wanting to do so. I invited you here because I thought it might help my niece, but …’
